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selenakScattered Italian impressions not jotted down before:
- the Vespa drivers really wear helmets these days, each and everyone of them. Will wonders never cease?
- Ice cream in Florence is far too expensive; that's blackmail; ice cream in more rural Tuscan areas, though, is a benefit from the gods; Viva gli gelati!
- I never saw birds fly as fast as over the Piazza del Campo when I was lying on it, waiting for the concert to begin; those swallows must have been disturbed by the noise, but the longer one watched them, the more they caused an eerie Hitchcockian sensation
- Which reminded me about Orson Welles calling Italy the country of birds in Michéal McLiammoir's OTHELLO memoirs "Put Money In Thy Purse", which in turn reminds me now of a great black-and-white photo of O.W. in Italy at Feltrinelli's which I rather coveted, but alas, it was not sold.
Also, I finished Charles Dickens' "Pictures from Italy". Which is eminently readable like everything Dickens wrote and paints a refreshingly different, unromantic view of 19th century Italy, but I do have issues with it. First some general observations.
Dickens has a rather endearing capability of being indignant. Also, since I as the reader know he's usually indignant about the injustices of Victorian England, I don't see him as a hypocrite only spotting faults abroad. So, kudos to Dickens for pointing out the dirt and the squalor and the exploitiveness and for refusing to be blinded because it's more picturesque than the same thing in England. On the other hand, he's torn about the Italian people; they're to be pitied but he also sees them as descendants of those bad, bad Romans, capable of being just as cruel. Dickens is simultanously thrilled and repulsed by every Roman ruin he passes, and given his fascination with cruelty in his novel, one can't help but feel this was guilty porn for him. This is him describing the Coloseum:
"To see it crumbling there, an inch a year; (…) to climb into its upper halls, and look down on ruin, ruin, ruin, all about it; (…) is to see the ghost of old Rome, wicked wonderful old city, haunting the very ground on which its people trod. Never, in its bloodiest prime, can the sight of the gigantic Coliseum, full and running over with the lustiest life, have moved one heart, as it must move all who look upon it now, a ruin. GOD be thanked: a ruin!"
Now, the same Dickens who goes on to reflect on "the nature of the firece and cruel Roman people" and states that "there is scarecely one countenance in a hundred, among the common people in the streets, that would not be at home and happy in a renovated Coliseum to-morrow" (good old Dickens couldn't have known about modern cinema and TV), hears that there is an execution, a beheading and promptly moves his British un-Roman self to the place. He notices there aren't many people about, and even less as the time drags on because the execution has to be delayed somewhat. But he stays. Finally, the condemmed plus soldiers arrives, is brought to the scaffold, and Dickens gets into journalistic detail:
"He immediately kneeled down, below the knife. His kneck fitting into a hole, made for the purpose, in a cross plank, was shut down, by another plank above; exactly like the pillory. Immediately below him was a leathern bag. And into it his head roled instantly. The executioner was holding it by the hair, and walking with it round the scaffold, showing it to the people, before one quite knew that the knife had fallen heavily, and with a rattling sound. When it had travelled round the four sides of the scaffold, it was set upon a pole in the front - a little patch of black and white, for the long street to stare at, and the flies to settle on. The eyes were turne upward, as if he had avoided the sight of the leathern bag, and looked to the crucifix. Every tinge and hue of life had left it in that instant. It was dull, cold and livid, wax. The body also.
There was a great deal of blood. When we left the window, and went close up to the scaffold, it was very dirty; one of the two men who were throwing water over it, turning to help the other lift the body into a shell, picked his way as through mire. A strange appearance was the apparent annihilation of the neck. The head was taken off so close, that it seemed as if the kife had narrowly escaped crushing the jaw, or shaving off the ear; and the body looked as if there were nothing left above the shoulder.
Nobody cared, or was at all affected. There was no manifestation of disgust, or pity, or indignation, or sorrow. It was an ugly, filthy, careless, sickening spectacle; meaning nothing but butchery beyond the momentary interest, to the one wretched actor."
Now, at this point I was fascinated and appalled right along with him but I couldn't quite share this particular indignation. Because it was his decision to go there, and stay, and watch.
Another recurrent theme for Dickens is the Catholic Church. Here he's not simultanously thrilled and appalled, he's just appalled. He's at his savage best with satire (comparing the pre-Lent decorations with the leftovers of a firecracker is typical for this book), but after the nth attack, I felt oppressed, not by the Catholic Church as Dickens wanted me to be, but by this relentless NO POPERY! Protestantism. Mass and procession attendees are either described as looking stupid, dull and witless (if they're following the goings-on) or hypocritical and sly (if they appear to be distracted). Kissing crosses and rubbing the toe of the St. Peter statue in Rome is unhygienic and disgusting. (One has to be grateful Dickens apparantly never made it into a Greek Orthodox Church.) St. Peter itself might be undeniably beautiful from an aesthetic point of view, but there is not a bit of Christian spirit in it, as opposed to Protestant English country churches. The ceremonies are theatrical, gaudy and empty, shrines are just means to extract money from the poor, and the Jesuits' sole aim in life, cunningly disguised behind founding schools and the like, seems to be extracting family secrets so they can blackmail rich powerful families. And so on, and so forth.
Now of course the Catholic Church could do with some inner reformation then, and now. But I, who was raised by two agnostic parents, still felt chilled and somewhat disgruntled by this exhibition of Dickens-the-zealot. Give me the over-the-top baroque style (though I'm a Gothic girl at heart as far as Cathedrals go) and the gaudy ceremonies any time over this kind of Cromwellian austerity. No wonder the Italians remained fundemantally alien to Dickens.
- the Vespa drivers really wear helmets these days, each and everyone of them. Will wonders never cease?
- Ice cream in Florence is far too expensive; that's blackmail; ice cream in more rural Tuscan areas, though, is a benefit from the gods; Viva gli gelati!
- I never saw birds fly as fast as over the Piazza del Campo when I was lying on it, waiting for the concert to begin; those swallows must have been disturbed by the noise, but the longer one watched them, the more they caused an eerie Hitchcockian sensation
- Which reminded me about Orson Welles calling Italy the country of birds in Michéal McLiammoir's OTHELLO memoirs "Put Money In Thy Purse", which in turn reminds me now of a great black-and-white photo of O.W. in Italy at Feltrinelli's which I rather coveted, but alas, it was not sold.
Also, I finished Charles Dickens' "Pictures from Italy". Which is eminently readable like everything Dickens wrote and paints a refreshingly different, unromantic view of 19th century Italy, but I do have issues with it. First some general observations.
Dickens has a rather endearing capability of being indignant. Also, since I as the reader know he's usually indignant about the injustices of Victorian England, I don't see him as a hypocrite only spotting faults abroad. So, kudos to Dickens for pointing out the dirt and the squalor and the exploitiveness and for refusing to be blinded because it's more picturesque than the same thing in England. On the other hand, he's torn about the Italian people; they're to be pitied but he also sees them as descendants of those bad, bad Romans, capable of being just as cruel. Dickens is simultanously thrilled and repulsed by every Roman ruin he passes, and given his fascination with cruelty in his novel, one can't help but feel this was guilty porn for him. This is him describing the Coloseum:
"To see it crumbling there, an inch a year; (…) to climb into its upper halls, and look down on ruin, ruin, ruin, all about it; (…) is to see the ghost of old Rome, wicked wonderful old city, haunting the very ground on which its people trod. Never, in its bloodiest prime, can the sight of the gigantic Coliseum, full and running over with the lustiest life, have moved one heart, as it must move all who look upon it now, a ruin. GOD be thanked: a ruin!"
Now, the same Dickens who goes on to reflect on "the nature of the firece and cruel Roman people" and states that "there is scarecely one countenance in a hundred, among the common people in the streets, that would not be at home and happy in a renovated Coliseum to-morrow" (good old Dickens couldn't have known about modern cinema and TV), hears that there is an execution, a beheading and promptly moves his British un-Roman self to the place. He notices there aren't many people about, and even less as the time drags on because the execution has to be delayed somewhat. But he stays. Finally, the condemmed plus soldiers arrives, is brought to the scaffold, and Dickens gets into journalistic detail:
"He immediately kneeled down, below the knife. His kneck fitting into a hole, made for the purpose, in a cross plank, was shut down, by another plank above; exactly like the pillory. Immediately below him was a leathern bag. And into it his head roled instantly. The executioner was holding it by the hair, and walking with it round the scaffold, showing it to the people, before one quite knew that the knife had fallen heavily, and with a rattling sound. When it had travelled round the four sides of the scaffold, it was set upon a pole in the front - a little patch of black and white, for the long street to stare at, and the flies to settle on. The eyes were turne upward, as if he had avoided the sight of the leathern bag, and looked to the crucifix. Every tinge and hue of life had left it in that instant. It was dull, cold and livid, wax. The body also.
There was a great deal of blood. When we left the window, and went close up to the scaffold, it was very dirty; one of the two men who were throwing water over it, turning to help the other lift the body into a shell, picked his way as through mire. A strange appearance was the apparent annihilation of the neck. The head was taken off so close, that it seemed as if the kife had narrowly escaped crushing the jaw, or shaving off the ear; and the body looked as if there were nothing left above the shoulder.
Nobody cared, or was at all affected. There was no manifestation of disgust, or pity, or indignation, or sorrow. It was an ugly, filthy, careless, sickening spectacle; meaning nothing but butchery beyond the momentary interest, to the one wretched actor."
Now, at this point I was fascinated and appalled right along with him but I couldn't quite share this particular indignation. Because it was his decision to go there, and stay, and watch.
Another recurrent theme for Dickens is the Catholic Church. Here he's not simultanously thrilled and appalled, he's just appalled. He's at his savage best with satire (comparing the pre-Lent decorations with the leftovers of a firecracker is typical for this book), but after the nth attack, I felt oppressed, not by the Catholic Church as Dickens wanted me to be, but by this relentless NO POPERY! Protestantism. Mass and procession attendees are either described as looking stupid, dull and witless (if they're following the goings-on) or hypocritical and sly (if they appear to be distracted). Kissing crosses and rubbing the toe of the St. Peter statue in Rome is unhygienic and disgusting. (One has to be grateful Dickens apparantly never made it into a Greek Orthodox Church.) St. Peter itself might be undeniably beautiful from an aesthetic point of view, but there is not a bit of Christian spirit in it, as opposed to Protestant English country churches. The ceremonies are theatrical, gaudy and empty, shrines are just means to extract money from the poor, and the Jesuits' sole aim in life, cunningly disguised behind founding schools and the like, seems to be extracting family secrets so they can blackmail rich powerful families. And so on, and so forth.
Now of course the Catholic Church could do with some inner reformation then, and now. But I, who was raised by two agnostic parents, still felt chilled and somewhat disgruntled by this exhibition of Dickens-the-zealot. Give me the over-the-top baroque style (though I'm a Gothic girl at heart as far as Cathedrals go) and the gaudy ceremonies any time over this kind of Cromwellian austerity. No wonder the Italians remained fundemantally alien to Dickens.
